The aim of targeting is to customize your promotional efforts to suit a target audience. This means that users are only shown ads for products or services that they could potentially find interesting.
Targeting was a lower priority in the early days of online advertising. Ad banners were generally placed on thematically relevant sites (e.g. an ad for soccer boots on a soccer blog), but this environment targeting was far from accurate. This resulted in a lot of scattering loss since some companies’ ads were also being shown to those who weren’t interested.
Better and more sophisticated targeting options gradually emerged. Environment targeting is still used, but socio-demographic data is also included, which improves synchronization. Additional targeting techniques used in conjunction with real-time advertising include:
The options described above follow the user wherever they go online, and not just in a relevant environment. This makes it possible to reach the target group and potential customers regardless of their surroundings. Targeting and addressing individual customers takes center stage with real-time advertising. Every ad impression (i.e. every retrieval of an advertisement) is connected with a user profile. The ad exchange marketplace offers advertisers this exact profile in real time. All these processes are now automated so their effectiveness is hard to beat. Supply and demand come together at the touch of a button – manual price negotiations or lengthy advertising and ad text exchanges aren’t required.